Agenda item

To receive performance information from the Corporate Performance & Improvement manager for Quarter 1 (2025/2026).

The Group were presented with, and NOTED, a slide showing performance information in the Service Delivery & Continuous Improvement area.

The dashboards aimed to give an ‘at a glance’ understanding of how services were performing in terms of performance measures, finance and risk. Any measures that were also part of the Corporate Plan were listed in yellow text.

The indicators were presented with current performance, the annual target and a RAG (red/amber/green) rating to indicate whether or not the Council was on track to meet its target. Overall performance was presented in a pie chart which combined the RAG ratings for both the performance and the finance measures.

For the measures showing as Amber or Red:

·         Household waste collected per household (Amber) was just behind what was a stretching target. There had been a 3.77% decrease in household waste collected compared to June 2024. Efforts to identify unauthorised additional bins and provide ongoing education supported this positive trend.

·         Household recycling rate (Amber) - As with the previous indicator, there was a stretching target in place. The service had seen an improvement of almost 2 percentage points compared to June 2024.

·         Staff turnover (Red) - There was an increase in turnover in April, in particular in the Leisure Service with a number of fixed term contracts coming to an end.

·         Public survey engagement rate (Red) – there had been a small drop in performance since Q4. This survey was now being run against the small number of new processes on the Customer Relationship Management system, and only since August 2024. As such there would soon be a complete year of data.

·         Households on chargeable garden waste (Amber) - only 12 households were behind target, so only by a very fine margin was the Council behind the internal performance target.

·         Agency Spend (Red) – an overspend was forecasted based on Qtr 1 figures. This cost was forecast to be offset by underspend in the main staffing budget.

·         SD&CI PDG – Projected Capital Outturn (Red) - the main underspend reflected the change in approach for the waste depot: changing from building a new depot to remodelling the current depot. This saved almost £2m from the 2025/26 budget. There were also a number of projects, particularly in leisure and waste with variance which largely offset each other. These included slippage on the replacement of a skatepark, additional spend on energy saving projects, and the additional cost of the new baler within Waste Services.

·         SD&CI PDG – Capital Slippage % of projects (Red) - this affected 4 out of 20 projects.

A brief discussion took place regarding whether or not the Red RAG rating should be changed to Green for the Projected Capital Outturn position for the Service Delivery & Continuous Improvement PDG. There had been a conscious decision by the Cabinet to set the target where they had but in light of recent decision regarding the waste depot it would be more correct to show this rating as Green. The officer agreed to reflect on this before reporting to the next meeting.